Calculating the Weight of Thor's Hammer, YouTube-Style

You got your science in my geek! You got your geek in my science! Either way, Comic Book Guy would be proud.

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How much does Thor's hammer weigh? Yes, it's a serious question. No, we're not talking about the child-like version you can pick up at your favorite local toy store, online geeky shopping place, or eBay. We mean the real deal. Mjolnir. That which Thor can summon to his hand, channel lightning out of, and bash people's heads in with.

Spoiler: It's not as much as you might expect, even though all the true Thor fans know that the thing was forged using the doesn't-really-exist Asgardian metal "uru." There's also the oft-repeated suggestion that it was forged using the core of a dying star, which isn't quite accurate;  it was forged in the core of a dying star, not using one.

YouTube's "Vsause3" did some research into the weight of said hammer, and managed to come up with a single figure: 42.3 pounds, so say the official sources over at Marvel. Giving that size of a hammer to a "Norse god" must be kind of like giving a plastic whiffle bat to a Major League Baseball player  at least, an unbreakable plastic whiffle bat.

"But let's say it was made out of a dying star. Specifically, the densest in the known universe  a neutron star," says Jake Roper, resident YouTube poster of many popular things.

"Taking the dimensions of Thor's Hammer and assuming it's made entirely out of that material, it would weight over ten quadrillion pounds," he goes on to add, following some brief calculations about the amount of mass inside a given amount of "neutron star material."

And what would happen were Thor  who might as well give up his gym membership if he has to heft that much hammer around on a daily basis  to drop said ten-quadrillion Mjolnir from a common height into the normal ground?

"Being alive is no longer a thing you do," Roper said, calculating out that the amount of force generated from the collision would be about 1.3 million times that of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by humanity. Worse, Thor's hammer would likely head right south through the Earth and directly into the planet's core  good news for Thor, in that he can just summon it right back to his hand, but bad news for anyone trying to live on the planet.

Roper goes on to comment that even the very presence of the hammer itself  and its great deal of concentrated mass  would be enough to pull you into it at a rate of 1,100 feet per second from around 100 feet away or so, a painful form of "spaghettification" that you might otherwise experience were you passing too close to the event horizon of a black hole.

Why's that? Remember Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation from physics class: "any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them," reads the Wikipedia definition.

David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month stint turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he has since rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors.
His rise to (self-described) fame in the world of tech journalism began during his stint an associate editor at Maximum PC, where his love of cardboard-based PC construction and meetings put him in charge...
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